Core Vocabulary "Public Organisation" / v0.01

SC245DI07171

D04.07 Report on policy support for e-Procurement
e-Procurement ontology

Report on policy support for e-Procurement

Document Metadata

Property / Value
Date / 2016-09-20
Status / Accepted
Version / 1.00
Authors / Nikolaos Loutas – PwC EU Services
Brecht Wyns – PwC EU Services
Stefanos Kotoglou – PwC EU Services
Dimitrios Hytiroglou – PwC EU Services
Reviewed by / Pieter Breyne – PwC EU Services
Natalie Muric – Publications Office
Cecile Guasch – European Commission, DG DIGIT
Vassilios Peristeras – European Commission, ISA Programme
Approved by / Natalie Muric – Publications Office

This study was prepared for the ISA Programme by:

PwC EU Services

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this report are purely those of the authors and may not, in any circumstances, be interpreted as stating an official position of the European Commission.
The European Commission does not guarantee the accuracy of the information included in this study, nor does it accept any responsibility for any use thereof.
Reference herein to any specific products, specifications, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favouring by the European Commission.
All care has been taken by the author to ensure that s/he has obtained, where necessary, permission to use any parts of manuscripts including illustrations, maps, and graphs, on which intellectual property rights already exist from the titular holder(s) of such rights or from her/his or their legal representative.

Contents

1.Introduction

1.1.Context

1.2.Proposed solution

1.3.Scope

1.4.Structure of this document

1.5.Common working terminology

2.Process, Methodology and Technology

3.Target Audience & Use Cases

3.1.Target audience

3.2.Use cases

4.Related Ontologies/Vocabularies and Projects

4.1.Data models and ontologies

4.1.1.CEN WS/BII business term vocabulary and semantic models

4.1.2.Open Contracting Data Standard

4.1.3.Universal Business Language

4.1.4.The European Single Procurement Document

4.1.5.CEN Core Invoice

4.1.6.e-Certis data model

4.1.7.ISA Core Vocabularies

4.1.8.The Public Procurement Ontology

4.1.9.LOTED2

4.1.10.The Linked Open Economy ontology

4.1.11.Payments ontology

4.1.12.Paraguayan procurement ontology

4.1.13.SEDIA

4.1.1.Common Data Model (CDM) of the Publications Office

4.1.2.Standard forms for public procurement (TED)

4.1.3.Other generic vocabularies that should be taken into consideration

4.2.Reference data and codelists

4.2.1.The Common Procurement Vocabulary

4.2.2.The Named Authority Lists of the Publications Office

4.2.3.Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics

4.3.Identification of reusable concepts

5.Conclusion and Next Steps

6.References

7.Annexes

7.1.Annex I: Classes of the LOE ontology

7.2.Annex II: Example of classes in the Paraguayan procurement

List of Figures

Figure 1: UBL "Invitation to Tender" process

Figure 2: ESPD Data Model [16]

Figure 3: Contract Class and subclasses[21]

Figure 4: core classes of PPROC [21]

Figure 5 Semi-Structured data extracted from TED

Figure 7: The three different levels of NUTS [27]

List of Tables

Table 1: Actors & roles

Table 2: Process Overview

Table 3: Methodology overview

Table 4 Overview of technology to be used

Table 5 Relevant actors for each use case

Table 6 Examples of CEN BII Profiles

Table 7 Main sections and objects in OCDS [11]

Table 8: UBL "Call for Tenders" Document Schema

Table 9 Example elements described in the Core Invoice data model

Table 10 Example Classes form the ISA Core vocabularies

Table 11: Classes of LOE ontology

Table 12: Example of classes in the Paraguayan procurement

Report on policy support for e-Procurement

1.Introduction

1.1.Context

Public procurement represents around the 20% of GDP in Europe. This big buying volume offers a high economic potential to enhance efficiency of European procurement.

The EU is investing significantly on the digitalisation of the public procurement process (referred to as e-Procurement). This goes beyond simply moving to electronic tools; it rethinks various pre-award and post-award phases with the aim to make them simpler for businesses to participate in and for the public sector to manage. It also allows for the integration of data-based approaches at various stages of the procurement process[1].

With e-Procurement, public spending should become more transparent, evidence-oriented, optimised, streamlined and integrated with market conditions. More specifically, e-Procurement offers a range of benefits such as:

  • significant savings for all parties, both businesses and the public sector;
  • simplified and shortened processes;
  • reductions in red-tape and administrative burdens;
  • increased transparency;
  • greater innovation;
  • new business opportunities by improving the access of enterprises, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to public procurement markets.

To deliver the aforementioned benefits, e-Procurement is heavily based on the exchange of data between different systems supporting the procurement processes (i.e. achieving end-to-end interoperability of public procurement processes and underlying systems) and on the availability and dissemination of procurement data to the wider public (i.e. improving transparency and stimulating innovation and new business opportunities).

As stated in the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/1986[2], contracting authorities in the EU are legally required to publish notices above certain thresholds. Article 6 of that Regulation states that either the eNotices online application or the TED eSender systems should be used to electronically transmit notices to the Publications Office of the European Union. From a different angle, the implementation of revised PSI directive[3] across the EU is calling for open, unobstructed access to public data in order to improve transparency and to boost innovation via the reuse of public data. Procurement data has been identified as data with a high-reuse potential[4]. Therefore, making this data available in machine-readable formats, following the data as a service paradigm, is required in order to maximise its reuse.

We hence see that data exchange,access and reuse becomekey requirements for efficient and transparent end-to-end public procurement. It is because of this, that we observe a focus shift from the definition of procurement process standardsfor system-to-system exchange, which have already gone a long way, to the development of data standards for publishing e-Procurementdata in open, machine-readable formats (see Chapter 4 Related Ontologies/Vocabularies and Projects).

The key problem is that procurement data is available in different systems across the European Union while

  • the relations between the different concepts in the procurement chain and data flow are not fully documented, therefore data and data relationships cannot be reused directly in a flexible and comparable manner;
  • some data available has inherited formats from its paper origins leading to illogical business processes and incorrect conceptual models;
  • different systems use different data formats therefore reuse of information is not always efficient; and
  • taxonomies like CPV are often not correctly used which creates severe problems like making it very difficult for SMEs to find correct business opportunities.

Given the increasing importance of data standards for e-Procurement, a number of initiatives driven by the public sector, the industry and academia have beenkick started in the recent years. Some have grown organically, while others are the result of standardisation work. The vocabularies and the semantics that they are introducing, the phases of public procurement that they are covering, and the technologies that they are using all differ. These differences hamper data interoperability and thus its reuse by them or by the wider public.This creates the need for a common data standard for publishing procurement data, hence allowing data from different sources to be easily accessed and linked, and consequently reused. The e-Procurement ontology (henceforth referred to as the ePO) introduced by this study aspires to play this role.

1.2.Proposed solution

The ultimate objective of the ePO is to put forth a commonly agreed OWL ontology that will conceptualise, formally encode and make available in an open, structured and machine-readable format data about public procurement, covering it from end to end, i.e. from notification, through tendering to awarding, ordering, invoicing and payment.

It is not the intention of the ePO to reinvent the wheel by redefining existing terms or processes, but rather to unify all existing practices, thus facilitating seamless exchange, access and reuse of data.

Process, Methodology and Technologydiscusses in detail the open process and methodology that will be followed for developing the ePO.

1.3.Scope

This report is not focusing on creating the specifications of the ePO neither in the form of a conceptual data model nor as an OWL ontology.

The scope of this report is to put together the necessary information for being able to proceed with the specification of the ePO, including a process and methodology to be followed for the development of the ePO. As such, the following activities are in scope of this work:

  • Identifythe target audience and the key use cases for the ePO;
  • Document and analyse existing initiatives to discover overlaps and gaps, and identify which ones to reuse and with which ones to align; and
  • Identify reference data and code lists that can be referenced to by the ePO.

1.4.Structure of this document

This document is structured in several sections. After describing the context, scope and the proposed solution presented by this work in section 1, section 2 proposes a process and methodology to be followed and the technology to be used for the development of an e-Procurement Ontology. Section 3 identifies the main stakeholders that are impacted by the ePO or that should be involved in its development. Moreover, it describes the possible use cases that the ePO aims to address. In section 4, relevant existing data models and codelists are identified and analysed. This section aims to assess the extent to which existing works could be reused in the ePO. Section 5 concludes on the work and identifies the next steps that have to be taken for the further development of the e-Procurement Ontology.

1.5.Common working terminology

Term / Definition
Public procurement / The process by which public authorities, such as government departments or local authorities, purchase work, goods or services from companies [1].
e-Procurement / e-Procurement is the conduction of the procurement process by means enabled by the internet [2].
Call for Tenders / Procedure of asking for bids to be submitted for the awarding of a contract[3].
Pre-award phase / e-Procurement process phases occurring up-until the award of the contract (e-Notification, e-Access, e-Submission, e-Evaluation, e-Awarding) [4].
Post-award phase / e-Procurement process phases occurring after the award of the contract (e-Ordering, e-Invoicing, e-Payment)[4].
Data standard / A structural metadata specification that describes or defines other data [ISO111179]. Structural metadata indicates how compound objects are put together [NISO]. It can consist of among others data models, reference data, and identifier schemas[5].
Data Model / A data model documents and organizes data, how it is stored and accessed, and the relationships among different types of data. The model may be abstract or concrete [6].
Conceptual data model / The conceptual model enables to understand the meaning of the data model. Generally, the conceptual data model is the most important. The conceptual model does not specify how properties and associations are technically represented[5].
Ontology[6] / A formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that exist for a particular domain. In the context of this report, an ontology should be expressed in OWL as this is the format used by the Common Data Model of the CELLAR, in which the ePO will be implemented.

2.Process, Methodology and Technology

The ePO will be developed following the ISA process and methodology for developing semantic agreements[7], which is an open consensus building process which engages a working group of experts. The process outlines the roles that the different actors in this process play, as summarised inTable 1, and the process steps that need to be taken in order to set up the working group environment. Table 2outlinesthe consensus building process itself, which will deliver in the end the ePO.

Table 1: Actors & roles

Actors & Roles
Reaching consensus
Working Group
The Working Group for building consensus on the eProcurement ontology comprises the following actors:
  • Chair(s):the Publications Office will appoint one or several, usually not more than two, chairs who are responsible for leading the meetings of the working group, for ensuring that the process and methodology specifications are followed and that consensus is reached within the working group.
  • Editor(s): one or several, usually not more than two, editors will be appointed, who are responsible for the operational work of defining and documenting the ePO.
  • Working group experts: besides the chairs and editors, the working group will mainly consist of experts who are contributing knowledge and expertise required for the specification of the ePO. Members of the following groups and communities will be invited to join the working group as experts:
  • Members of the multi-stakeholder expert group on eProcurement[7] of DG GROW;
  • Staff working on eProcurement from national, regional and local administrations in the EU Member States;
  • Staff working on eProcurement from the EU institutions, including representatives of CEF Telecom and the Open Data Portal;
  • Members of the CEN TC 440[8] (Technical Committee on Electronic Public Procurement) and the CEN TC 434[9] (Technical Committee on Electronic Invoicing);
  • Members of the Core Vocabularies working groups;
  • Members of the OpenSpending network,publicspending.net, the Open Contracting Partnership and related initiatives;
  • Research and academia working on related initiatives (refer to Chapter 4for an overview of related activities).
Review Group
AReview Group shouldbe invited to provide an independent external review on the first full draft of the ePO. This will be done as part of the public comment period. The members of the Review Group will come from the same groups and communities as the members of the Working Group. Ideally, a member of the Working Group should not also be part of the Review Group.

Table 2: Process Overview

Process
Reaching consensus
  1. Identify stakeholders(The Publications Office and a contractor)
  2. Form working group(The contractor in agreement with the Publications Office)
  3. Identify chair(s)(The Publications Office with input from a contractor)
  4. Identify editor(s) (The Publications Office).
  5. Identifyreview group(Chair(s) and Editor(s))
  6. Verifyand secure IPR[10] (Intellectual property rights)(The Publications Office and the contractor as necessary)
  7. Establish working environment and culture(Chair(s) and Editor(s))
  8. Publish drafts(Chair(s) and Editor(s))
  9. Review drafts(Working Group experts)
  10. Publish last call working draft(Chair(s) and Editor(s))
  11. Review last call working draft(Review Group)
  12. Gather evidence of acceptance(Chair(s) and Editor(s))
  13. Submit for endorsement(The Publications Office)

Once steps 1 to 7 of the process listed above are conducted, the Working Group can start its operational activities. Steps 8 and 9 in the process above – creating and reviewing drafts – are repeated to iteratively create the ePO specification. The technical methodology, describing the steps that must be undertaken in the development of a specification, is described in Table 3 below.Especially steps 5 and 6 in the methodology below, i.e. the creation of a conceptual data model, might require several iterations and drafts before consensus in the Working Group is reached. For the Chairs, editors and Working group to have a starting point (for points 1-3 below) the contractor will present a project charter, a further developed analysis based on this report of the methodology to be used. This will include:

  1. how to reach the formal OWL ontology,
  2. produce the conceptual model and information requirements

from the suggested use cases via

  1. the reuse of existing data and services
  2. suggesting synergies with other working groups in the domain of open data and/or public procurement.

The working group will agree on the methodology to produce the deliverables, adding and removing use cases as necessary whilst adapting the methodology as it finds fit.

Table 3: Methodology overview

Methodology
Developing a specification
  1. Review analysis of existing solutions (based on Chapter 4 of this report and analysis mentioned in paragraph above)(Editor(s) and Working Group)
  2. Review analysis of existing data and services (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  3. Define and agree on use cases (based on Chapter 3 and analysis mentioned in paragraph above) (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  4. Define methodology to be used (see analysis mentioned in paragraph above)
  5. Identify information requirements (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  6. Identify a meaningful set of Core Concepts (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  7. Define and agree on terminology and create a conceptual data model (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  8. Define naming conventions (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  9. Define identifier conventions (Editor(s) and Working Group)
  10. Draft the namespace document (Editor(s))
  11. Specify conformance criteria (Chair(s) and Editor(s))
  12. Perform quality assurance (Chair(s))

There will be a number of technologies and tools used to create and underpin the ePO, the main of which are listed in Table 4 Overview of technology to be used below:

Table 4 Overview of technology to be used

Technology & Tools
Creating a model
OWL DL
The OWL language is built upon the RDF standard. It is an ontology modelling language for describing RDF data. It allows for the strict definition of concepts and the complex relationships between them[11]. The eProcurement Ontology should be expressed in OWL since the Common Data Model of the CELLAR[12] – in which the ePO will be implemented – is expressed in OWL.
SPARQL
SPAQL is a semantic query language. It is used to retrieve and manipulate data stored in RDF format[13].
PROTÉGÉ
Protégé is an open source ontology editor developed and maintained by Stanford University[14].

3.Target Audience & Use Cases

3.1.Target audience

The target audience of the ePO comprises the following groups of stakeholders: